Olives Gourmet Grocer to close Belmont Shore store

LONG BEACH >> After six years of serving as Second Street’s neighborhood grocery store with deli items, prepared foods and staples such as milk, bread and — of course, olives — Olives Gourmet Grocer plans to close its doors on Monday.

The new independent business owner tentatively moving into the 5000 E. Second St. location is Carolyn Baer of Cheers Catering Inc. Baer will call her new store Urban Table.

Olives owners Laurie Semon and Erin O’Hagan said they are leaving the space because they want to focus more on catering and expanding their original Olives location at 3510 E. Broadway in Belmont Heights. They plan to open a new café next door to Olives on Broadway.

“We cannot have both,” O’Hagan said, explaining that she didn’t want to stretch the business too thin but instead put 100 percent effort into the 10-year-old Broadway location and planned café.

“We’ve been saying we were going to do a café on Broadway for the last six or seven years,” O’Hagan said. “We want to add to Long Beach’s food scene and bring a farm-to-table concept with wine and catering to that space. To do that, we needed to let our Belmont Shore location go.”

O’Hagan said that people have been making offers to take over the Belmont Shore corner space at Argonne Avenue and Second Street for many years, but she believes she’s leaving the space in good hands with the new tenant there.

“For us, the timing was right to let someone else in,” she said. “We’ve found an independent business owner who we are excited to hand the torch to.”

In business with her husband, Sam Isaac, Baer said they have been looking for a storefront in Belmont Shore for some time. She and her husband live in Belmont Shore, although Cheers Catering Inc. has been based in Los Angeles for the past 28 years.

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“Urban Table will be a gourmet market with gourmet items and a café and catering,” she said. “We are going to change the look a little bit (from Olives), but the services we provide will be pretty much the same.”

O’Hagan said many people in Belmont Shore have been disappointed to hear that the business is leaving, but she feels complimented by the fact that the business was so well loved. She hopes customers continue to support Olives at the Broadway location.

For more information about Olives, visit www.olivesgourmetgrocer.com.

Ashleigh Ruhl is an editor with Gazette Newspapers. She can be reached at aruhl@gazettes.com.